SPIRITED SATIRE:
THE FICTION OF BERTRAND RUSSELL
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
Humanities Deparrment I The University pf Michigan-Dearborn
Dearborn, MI 48128, USA
ong the writers contributing to the resurgence of satiric fiction
in the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell is an unexpected
figure. His reputation rests primarily, of course, on his contributions to logic and on his efforts to make philosophy scientific-that
is, to identify its methods with those of the sciences. These interests
seem far removed from literary endeayours. Even his Nobel Prize for
Literature does not characterize Russell as a fiction-writer, for the prize
recognized the literary value of his philosophical and social commentary addressed to the general public. The award citation described his
work for this audience in· these words: "varied and significant writing
in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of
thought".1 In fact, at the time Russell received the Prize (1950), his
fiction-writing for publication still lay ahead. Then in the next decade,
when past the age of eighty, Russell produced three volumes of short
stories. Today, however, some forty years later, while his popular
essays and books continue to attract wide readership, the stories are
still little known. Perhaps, as he himself declared, both publishers and
readers have been reluctant to accept him as a writer of fiction, preferring to emphasize his role as a social prophet (Auto. 3: 34). Yet the
stories reward thoughtful readers.
This positive assessment admits the limitations of Russell's fiction,
which lacks the keen and confident mastery of his expository prose.
He hardly is a skilled architect of plot or a creator of substantial char-
A
I Irving L Polonoff, "Benrand Russell", in British W7nnm of the Nobel Literary
Prize, ed. WalterE. Kidd (Norman, Okla.: U. of Oklahoma P., 1973), pp. 171-2.
russell: the Journal of the Bemand Russell Archives
McMaster University Library Press
n.s. t3 (summer 1993): 63-81
ISSN 0036-01631
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Spirited Satire
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
acters. His stories tend to demonstrate ideas by means of flat figures
rather than to illustrate compelling human situations or the complexities of human nature. Critical response to Russell's stories, while
varied, has included· some restrained praise and negative judgments.
Indeed, one literary critic declares that the fiction "merits ... oblivion"
and that its publication is "injudicious".2 But such criticism fails to
consider Russell's intention to work by his own method within the
context of traditional satire and fails to reflect on the ways his stories
turn satire's possibilities to good account.
Influenced by wide reading in earlier eras, Russell tended toward a
formal, elegant style in accordance with past manners; Goldsworthy
Lowes Dickinson once praised it as having "the quality of the best
seventeenth-century prose, which is the highest praise one can give."3
Temperamentally drawn to satire, Russell admired its skilful practitioners, particularly the Enlightenment figure Voltaire. Russell evidenced enjoyment of seventeenth-century wit when he .parodied
another French writer in "Newly Discovered Maxims of La Rochefoucauld".4
Satire produced during the Victorian era, in which Russell spent his
first three decades, generally reflected the period's prevailing belief in
progress. Russell, despite many changes in thought over his long life,
considered himself as remaining, in some way, characteristically Victorian in personality: "I grew up in the full flood of Victorian optimism, and although the easy cheerfulness of that time is no longer
possible, something remains within me of the hopefulness that then
was easy" (PfM, p. 8). This lingering effect may explain why Russell,
when he turned to short stories, frequently employed a humorous,
even playful, approach characteristic of that earlier time of "easy cheerfulness".
As massive new problems jostled each other early in the twentieth
2 S. P. Rosenbaum, "The Logic of a Literary Symbol", in Russell in Review: the
Bertrand Russell Centenary Celebrations at McMaster University, October I2-I4 I972, ed.
J. E. Thomas and K. Blackwell (Toronto: Samuel Stevens, Hakkert, 1976), p. 60.
3 Letter, 21 July 1912, quoted in The Collected Stories ofBertrand Russel~ ed. Barry
Feinberg (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p.
hereafter .are cited in the text as "CS'.
4 In Fact and Fiction and CS.
10.
65
century, the age generated energetic new uses of satire. The various
satirists often laced their works with a strong, even bitter, message.
Russell's approach, while lighter, likewise allowed him to treat
anxieties and dreads. Seemingly originating in his sense of fun, the
fiction was inspired by Russell's deepening need to speak in a new way
of the problems of the times, as the Autobiography explains:
The writing of these stories was a great release of my hitherto unexpressed
feelings and of thought which could not be stated without mention of fears
that had no rational basis. Gradually, their scope widened. I found it possible
to express in this form dangers that would have been deemed silly while only
a few men recognized them. I could state in fiction ideas which I half
believed in but had no good solid grounds for believing. In this way it was
possible to warn of dangers that might or might not occur in the near future.
(3: 31- 2 )
The resulting stories boast at least three virtues: insight into Russell as
a thinker; illustration of traditional sa~ire's influence on a contemporary writer; and original contribution to the genre, in the small but
clever form Russell called the "nightmare" and deemed appropriate to
our age.
Russell held imaginative composition in high regard. While he
intended his social and political writings to be strongly persuasive, he
never held fiction to a narrowly didactic purpose: "To appreciate
Hamlet will not be much use in practical life" , he commented, "except
in those rare cases where a man is called upon to kill his uncle."5 Russell's respect for the imagination appears in his comment in "Notes for
a speech to the Authors' Club, II February 1953": "Fiction emancipates
man from the tyranny of fact & liberates the Imagination. Imagination, not slavery to fact, is the source of whatever is good in human
life" (CS, p. 5).
Those words were written just after Russell had published the first
volume of stories, Satan in the Suburbs (1953). He followed this book
.the next year with a second group of stories, Nightmares ofEminent
Persons and, later, with Fact and Fiction (1961), a medley containing
References to this work
5
22.
On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926), p.
66
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
some additional "Nightmares". For readers of his social and political
commentaries, this venture seems a natural development of Russell's
turn of mind. Satiric wit is a chief attribute of his style, one that surely
helped him attract and hold a wide reading public, especially as that
wit seems to invite readers into an inner circle of shared ironic vision.
Russell himself declares: "I should not wish to be thought in earnest
only when I am solemn."6 The comment and the nature of his fictive
production suggest that Russell's "muse" was the strong psychological
complex that manifest~ itself as the satiric spirit.
Before his first story appeared in 1951, Russell tested the waters by
publishing it ~onymously in a London magazine, Go, where a contest
to guess its authorship brought no winner. The story was "The
Corsican Ordeal of Miss X", later included in Satan in the Suburbs.
Russell describes it as a warning to his secretary against the perils of a
holiday in Cotsica. In this fanciful tale, Russell adopts a frolicsome
tone, telling us that with this little story he held in mind two works,
the gothic romance The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and the romantic
satire Zuleika Dobson, Max" Beerbohm's extravagant burlesque of
Oxford life and Edwardian attitudes (CS, p. II). Written in 1910, this
zany book-whose beautiful heroine wreaked havoc upon the hearu
of Oxford's masculine population-was such a huge popular success
that, according to Beerbohm's bibliographer, whole printings of it
were "read to pieces"'? In "Corsican Ordeal", Russell gives Miss X
adventures much like those of Emily St. Aubert in The Mysteries of
Udolpho: vendettas, assaults, and encounters with mountain bandits.
But Russell's conclusion, unlike Mrs. Radcliffe's, does not present the
6 Bertrand Russell's Best: Silhouettes in Satire, ed. Roben E. Egner (London: Unwin,
195 8), p. 7·
The acknowledgment that in his work meaning is likely to be embodied in wit
undoubtedly touches on a factor in Russell's appeal as a writer, but his practice of wit
does not always receive applause. Some readers consider satire inappropriate in scholarly works; in Russell's canon an example that has met criticism on this basis is A
History afWestern Philosophy. Even Russell's ever-devoted first wife, Alys, wrote of the
History: "It is very good reading, especially in the character sketches, but they are too
full of sly fun, like Lytton Srrachey's 'the dirty ears of the cardinals,' slightly malicious
& very Bertiean ... " (letter to Bernard Berenson, II Jan. 1946, Villa I Tatti, Florence,
Italy; copy in RA REC. ACQ. 23).
7 A. E. Gallatin and 1. M. Oliver, A Bibliography of the \%rks ofMilX Beerbohm
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), p. 22.
Spirited Satire 67
traditional marriage of young lovers; it rests, instead, like that of
Zuleika Dobson, on the parodying of a romantic convention, a heroic
death on the field of honour.
In contrast, the narrative "Zahatopolk" gives a complex, serious
treatment to the theme so lightly treated in "Corsican Ordeal", the
suppression of human beings by rigid social institutions. This theme
of society's restrictiveness first became significant in Russell's Principles
of Social Reconstruction (1916). Using Platonic dialogue, the story
employs for its central, questing character the name of Socrates'
"instructress", Diotima, but puts these materials, together with allusions to Blake, Shaw, Swift and others, into new patterns. Within "
these patterns, we recognize elements in Russell's thought that Ronald
Jager discusses in "Russell and Religion": his wistful search for justification for emotions of awe, his residual Puritan ethic, and his use of a
8
perspective that attempts to transcend human limitations.
Exemplifying this use, Russell opens his story in the Incas' restored
hall at Cuzco, where enormous mou~tain peaks surround the community, isolating it in the way characteristic of utopias, and further
distances the community from us by setting the time forty centuries
into the future. We must see our own time as the Past, a way of
thinking favoured by Russell in his early essays and recommended by
him as a means to increase wisdom and diminish sorrow. Professor
Driuzdustades, lecturing to the hundred best students of Peru, comments on our age in a way that is literal from his viewpoint and ironic
from ours. His society is one of world domination based on "the
innate superiority of the Red Man" and the "smooth perfection" of
the system instituted by the "divine" Zahatopolk (CS, p. 83)· This
society looks back on ours as an era in which the Graeco-JudeanChristian world was being replaced because its culture was becoming
invalid. While certainly a critic of our present world structure, Russell
makes a point against this future "utopian" society: the professor is
"dry as dust", an inhabitant of a dead world. Preaching the myth of
"Zahatopolk, he occupies a wasteland where there is no fountain; more
than boring, he is unable to inspire, to be a source of wisdom. Russell
8 I am indebted for the line of thinking in the discussion of this story to Jager's
insights throughout "Russell ~ Religion", in Russell in "Review.
68
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
suggests a VISIOn of wasteland like T. S. Eliot's, but challenges the
confidence of those who, like Eliot and others, believe social ills can
be ameliorated by dogmatizing mythic views. Speaking to a subject
important to other writers of the era, such as Thomas Mann, Russell
warns against making even science a mythos.
The necessity of keeping a living, progressive, and evolutionary
process at work in the affairs of humanity becomes Russell's chief
theme in this story. Because its targets are abstract (for example, the
myth-making that tends toward racism, nationalism, or rigid orthodoxy) and its themes are grand and solemn (the necessity of our facing
continuing change and employing the historical imagination), this
story bears a heavy cargo of philosophical issues. Despite Russell's.
obvious efforts to provide and connect symbols, the tale is probably
too complex and allegorical to entertain modern readers, and it satirizes what may be too many targets. Yet as it breaks apart and reassembles the ingredients of past and present cultures, "Zahatopolk"
scores a technical success, the able use of multiple narrators, and, more
than the other stories, offers a strong and complex sense of Russell's
own religious quest, an emphasis on what he earlier termed "the life of
spirit" (PSR, p. 8).·
As these stories were taking form, Russell was also working on a
non-fiction book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954). He
states that he wrote it to answer criticism that he had largely ignored
ethics. This gap in his philosophical writing was, indeed, the result of
his having come "to agree with Santayana that there is no such thing
as ethical knowledge. Nevertheless," he explains in the Autobiography,
"ethical concepts have been of enormous importance in history, and I
could not but feel that a survey of human affairs which omits ethics is
inadequate and partial" (3: 28). The most important aspect of the
book Human Society in Ethics and Politics is, Russell continues, "the
impossibility of reconciling ethical feelings with ethical doctrines. In
the depths of my mind, this dark frustration brooded constantly. I
tried to intersperse lighter matters into my thqughts, especially by
writing stories which contained an element of fantasy" (3: 30). Thus
we see as Russell's creative motivation the wish to cheer himself; in
spinning fantasies, he was coping with the problems of his rational
life. The creation of stories provided an escape from the discomfort of
ethical dualism and revealed the potential for sharing his ethical plight
Spirited Satire
69
with others.
This brooding, "dark frustration" is thematic in wh~t is probably
Russell's most successful piece of fiction, the long title story of Satan
in the Suburbs. Mixing fantasy with satire, as in "Corsican Ordeal",
Russell manages a more workable fusion. "Satan in the Suburbs"
belongs to the genre of science fiction, utilizing as it does the familiar
figure of the evil scientist, here a Dr. Mallako, whose diabolical machinations create a semi-allegorical plot. The story had its genesis in an
actual event, Russell's meeting in Mortlake with a man who, upon
seeing him, crossed himself and walked on the other side of the street.
Given by accident, the funny happening offered fictive possibilities.
The story opens with a clash of meanings, the nameless narrator's
statement "I live in Mortlake." If we miss the implications of death in
the prefix [Mort-], menace is reinforced by the hint of murder in
Murdoch (Dr. Mallako's first name) and the prefix [mat-], stressing the
bad in Mallako.
Surrounded by gray banality in Mortlake, the narrator one day
discovers Dr. Mallako's new brass plate on the gate of a villa he passes
every day. The words intrigue him:
HORRORS MANUFACTURED HERE
Apply Dr. Murdoch Mallako
With its defiant gleam, the plate is a lure to the restless and bored. It
hints of psychological horrors that touch each person's individual fears
or risk his individual dreams, flashing an appeal to the gambler's
instinct, a message made explicit in Dr. Mallako's response to a letter
of inquiry. The doctor preys on the desire to escape from the ordinary: in the hope of providing "thrills and excitement" for his patients,
Mallako has entered his "wholly novel profession" (CS, p. «). But his
profession is perhaps not novel at all; it may be the ancient one of the
Tempter, and the story's real horror may be that the "victim of uniformity" is enticed into becoming Mallako's victim.
Dr. Mallako's "innocents" are the inhabitants of Mortlake, typical
citizens of a contemporary suburb, whose typicality is underscored by
Russell's naming: Mr. Abercrombie, Mr. Beauchamp, Mr. Cartwright,
Mrs. Elleker, and the peripheral Mr. Gosling. Suggesting "Mr. A",
"Mr. B", "Mr. C" from a problem in algebra, they are semi-allegorical
70
Spirited Satire
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
figures whose naming mocks their individuality just as it underlines
the universality of their temptations. One after the other-in nearly
alphabetical order-they are drawn into the net of circumstances Dr.
Mallako spreads~ Even the narrator, at first merely a spectator-a
"scientific observer"-is at length entrapped. Despite initial resistance,
he meets at last his own "horror", the need to become a murderer, the
slayer of Dr. Mallako.
Obsessed by his compulsion, the narrator takes the reader with him:
the reader sees a "logical necessity" in the destruction of Dr. Mallako,
the Devil. But what if he is only an arrogant and eccentric medical
man? Like Milton in a greater temptation scene, Russell successfully
portrays temptation and a Fall that involves the reader, while adding a
contemporary note of moral confusion. And his narrator not only
repeats the weakness of Adam, but also the homicidal criminality of
Cain: Mallako and the narrator are brother scientists. When they
become competitors as inventors of a death-dealing device, the chief
difference that separates them is their attitude toward the human race.
The narrator's problem becomes a series of questions for the reader. Is
Dr. Mallako only, as French literary critic Phillippe Devaux calls him,
"a disguised misanthrope"?9 Can the modern reader believe otherwise? But what is Mallako's classification when his scientific discoveries have given him the power of universal life and death? An
integral part of our response relates to Mallako's occupation. We may
see him in three ways: as an innovative medical practitioner literally at
work in the suburbs, who perhaps playfully, but surely irresponsibly,
releases the id of each patient to the regret of all; as an advocate of the
cult of irrationality, who is internalized by the narrator into a nightmare figure, appearing in bad dreams "sometimes with hooves and tail
and with his brass plate worn as a breastplate" (CS, p. 46); orviewing the story metaphysically-as the embodiment of ultimate evil.
As a force in the community, he allows Russell to satirize the thinkers
who lapse from the standard of rationality and weapon-making scientists, the one contemporary group able to offer the world "Horrors
Manufactured Here".
9 "Essais romanesques de Bertrand Russell",
(1973): 560.
Revue internationale de phi/osophie, 26
71
Dr. Mallako's method is to implant suggestions into the minds of
his patients. But the implantations are malignant, breaking down the
barriers of resistance and control. The crux of the story is that
Mallako's powers can become truly Satanic-he can wreak irrevocable
destruction on all humankind--only when the narrator himself in a
great surrender to irrationality supplies the final knowledge that this
devil-figure needs. Russell's first-person narrator, a scientist, is a spectator as the story begins. His gradual change from observer to participant in evil provides the plot, a paradigm of the plight of the atomic
scientist: no restraints remain on human bestiality except reason and
self-discipline. In the aftermath of World War II and the Bomb,
Russell finds the fiction of a nameless Faustian narrator and a devilfigure a device for presenting the struggle of chthonian forces against
the rational. Knowing Russell's general impatience with supernatural
explanations, we understand that fiction allowed him to traffic in ideas
he otherwise could not put forward. Although as a philosopher he
refused to deal with the origin of evil metaphysically as part of a system, as a writer he treats the subject artistically, organizing a complex
criticism of contemporary life into a unified satiric fiction. In this
vision, Russell faces the great challenge of our age, the exploration of
human personality, and makes that inward journey ironical. When we
venture there, horrors are manufactured. As with Kurtz in Conrad's
Heart ofDarkness--a work Russell much admired-the heart of darkness in "Satan in the Suburbs" is each character's own. And we all live
in Mortlake.
If we reject the metaphysical level of the story, we must read it on
the level of the psychological. We are then led to reflect that the narrator ends his communication with us from a mental hospital, where
he now resides, along with his "dear Mrs. Ellerker", "wondering
whether there will ever be in the world more than two sane people."
Here we feel the ironic distance between author and character as
Russell implies an ideal of rationality above the actions of the wellintentioned, but murderous, scientist-narrator and the ladylike, but
indirectly murderous, woman he cannot save. They are ironically "at
home" in the universe of their mental hospital, where an ironic order
rules; once a year, they are allowed to meet at a "well-patrolled dance"
for the "better behaved patients" (CS, p. 81). This vision barely skirts
the tragic, placing on human individuality and participation such high
72
Spirited Satire
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
costs as crime and madness, but it is ultimately a complex, satiric
vIsion.
Russell's fascination with the discoveries of the inner self increases
in the set of stories called Nightmares ofEminent Persons. These complex little fables are his most distinctive contribution to fiction, and
Russell seems to have special zest in creating them, as he indicates by
writing a dozen. Their format is a pointed way to comment on current issues or philosophical ideas. Each "nightmare" involves a dream
sequence, set into a frame of waking reality; thus each combines reality
with fantasy. Taken together, they allow Russell to express his interest
in the forces of the unconscious and his fear that these may lead to
irrational modes that endanger humankind. The genre permits comment on timely issues and specific personalities, but such subjects may
become dated, as we see from the titles "Dean Acheson's Nightmare",
"Stalin's Nightmare", and "Eisenhower's Nightmare". Fortunately for
today's readers, Russell also used the form to satirize types, such as
"The Existentialist", "The Theologian", and "The Mathematician". A
quick look at two "nightmares" indicates the range to which Russell
can take their common theme, the opposition of intellect and emotions.
The fable "The Mathematician's Nightmare", for example, ironically contrasts the diminished world of modern mathematical "reality"
with the possibility of mathematics as religious experience or "vision".
It presents a fictional mathematician, Professor Squarepunt, who is a
friend of Sir Arthur Eddington, the twentieth-century physicist,
astronomer, and evolutionist who tried to reconcile science and religion. The story introduces mathematics as a great cosmic dance, a
ballet of all the numbers, in which two, the prime number 137 and the
irrational number Pi, play extraordinary roles. One charm of this story
is Russell's ability to personifY abstractions: "Pi's face was masked, and
it was understood that none could behold it and live. But piercing
eyes looked out from the mask, inexorable, cold, and enigmatic" (CS,
p. 236). Number 137 (which held magical properties for Eddington as
does 666 for some Biblical interpreters) represents the lone protester
who stands against the mistakes of organized society, a "blasphemer"
against the tradition that mathematics embodies eternal, Platonic
verities. When Squarepunt at last turns the members to mist-in an
action like that of Lewis Carroll's Alice when she disperses the court
73
members as "nothing but a pack of cards"-he cries, "Avaunt! You are
only Symbolic conveniences!" As he wakes from his nightmare, he
cries, "So much for Plato!" (CS, p. 239), and the remarks resonate with
the resolution of Russell's early Platonic dualism while the story itself
suggests the problematic relation of the individualist and authority.
Dismissing Plato so airily, .however, is more easily said in this little
story than done in Russell's actual philosophical development. From
his autobiographical writings, we know that for decades the Platonic
world of absolute, .timeless ideas exercised enormous appeal for him
and that he saw mathematics as a structure in that world, offering
perfection and delight. In A History of western Philosophy, .Russell
discusses this association of mathematics with Plato's thought; suggests
that it is an element that originated in the teachings of Pythagoras;
and treats Plato's pervasive influence on later thinkers, including philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Not until World War I changed
him, Russell tells us in "The Retreat from Pythagoras", did he lose
"the feeling that only Plato's world of ideas gives access to the 'real'
world" (MPD, p. 213).
An illustration of Plato's influence appears in the outline for an
unwritten story.IO The outline is entitled "A Judge's Nightmare:
Socrates through the Ages" and dated 20 January 1953. (See the
Appendix for the text of the manuscript.) Although fragmentary, the
sketch is rich in implications, many revealing Platonic influence: like
Plato, Russell has chosen a literary form to present his philosophical
ideas and make us think about thinking-here, thinking about justice.
Further, he illustrates the abstract ideal of Justice-one Justicethrough its opposite, Injustice, by taking the Platonic idea of the one
Injustice (the essence of what Injustice is) and giving it fictional
concreteness. In the outline he proposes to begin his little narrative
with the last speech of Plato's revered Socrates from the Phaedo, thus
presenting the level of political practice as Plato saw it in his time. For
the body of the story, Russell projects a series of "incarnations" of
Injustice, with the trial and execution of Socrates followed by a listing
of other martyrs, persons similarly convicted throughout Western
history of trumped-up, false, or absurd charges. From his note" muta-
10
I am indebted to Dr. Blackwell for bringing (his document to my arrention.
74
Spirited Satire 75
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
tis mutandiS', we surmise that Russell intended the examples to present permutations and combinations of social and political injustice.
Russell opens his outline with the cryptic statement "Pythagoras
right, not Orpheus". He probably refers to the push toward the
rational that Pythagoras gave to Orphic religious tradition in Greek
thought. Orpheus, Russell tells us, was "a dim but interesting figure",
perhaps "actual", perhaps an "imaginary hero ... said to have been a
reformer." His teaching "spiritualized" the lusty, drunken, sometimes
brutal and violent practices that characterized the worship of Bacchus,
the ancient god of wine and revelry. Orpheus's disciples attempted to
purify their rites to attain union with the god through mental, not
physical, intoxication (HWP, p. 16)..
This tendency toward mysticism, important in Greek temperament,
Russell explains, characterized Pythagoras; but he was also strongly
intellectual, and his intense contemplation developed into mathematical insights. He was, in Russell's amusing description, "a combination
of Einstein and Mrs. Eddy" (HWP, p. 31). Like Orpheus, Pythagoras
acted as a reformer, reinforcing the mysticism of Orphic religion with
the rigor of mathematics and passing this combination of elements
onward to Plato. The influence helped to shape Plato's doctrine of the
world of ideas and to establish the ongoing trend in religious philosophy toward a blending with reasoning. It is easy to see why Russelldrawn to both mysticism and logic-attributes immense influence on
intellectual history to Pythagoras as well as to Plato.
Reading this outline makes the reader wish for the finished story.
For one thing, just what Russell intends by the phrase the "last
speech" from the Phaedo is arguable. Does he mean the long, somewhat digressive, blit ultimately informative dialogical total that presents Socrates' faith in absolutes and thus defines his relation to the
Law, creating his impressive final portrait? It is this acceptance of the
Law as ideal that inspires Socrates' conception of morally responsible
citizenship and prevents his effort to escape or even to postpone death:
"I should only be ridiculous in my own eyes for sparing and saving a
life which is already forfeit." Does he have in mind Socrates' "tale" of
the soul's sojourning after death at Phaedo IIOb-II5a? Or does Russell
refer simply to the haunting little passage, "Crito, I owe a cock to
Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?" If the whole dialogue
of the Phaedo is meant, the portrait reveals Socrates' equanimity and
integrity in this situation and makes credible Phaedo's claim that
Socrates, of all men he knew, was "the wisest and justest and best". If
only the very last words are meant, Russell's explanation of the passage
adds an illuminating stroke to the picture: "Men paid a .cock to Asclepius when they recovered from an illness, and Socrates has recovered
from life's fitful fever" (HWP, 'p. 142). In any case, the theme of the
story appears to be that although Injustice occurs, the proper philosophical outlook both ennobles and liberates. In a relevant discussion
of Spinoza, Russe!l comments: "On the last day of his life he was
entirely calm, not exalted, like Socrates in the Phaedo, but conversing,
as he would on any other day, about matters of interest to his interlocutor." Such an outlook, one that meditates on life, nOt death,
Russell points out, liberates "men from the tyranny of fear" (HWP, p.
574). The outlook also permits its possessor to maintain calm in the
face of accusations such as those levelled at both Socrates and
Russell-of being a gadfly to society and a corrupter of youth.
It could almost be claimed that the outline stands as a story itsel£
In the Phaedo, Socrates is talking about the immortality of the soul
and about reincarnation. Russell's vision in the outline reinforces these
themes by implying the incarnation of the soul as Socrates would have
had it. The process is not finished in human history, and neither is
the story. II
In demonstrating Socrates' (and Plato's) theme, Russell has created
a modernist "plot": open-ended, unfinished. Perhaps Russell didn't
finish the story because he was engaged in immediate, practical
struggles for world safety and lost interest in battling an abstraction, in
simply writing a story about the idea of Injustice. Or perhaps he left
the story unfinished because he never resolved his own "dialogue with
Plato"; in the 1950S, he held, despite early platonic leanings, that Plato
as a philosopher should be treated "with as little reverence as if he
were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism"
(HWP, p. 105). Possibly, Russell did not finish the story because, in
the end, he could not envision a stoppage to humankind's repetition
of injustice. The plot left him with the substantiated thesis that the
maltreatment and persecution of good persons will continue. But this
II
Dr. Nadine Dyer, personal communication.
76
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
concept conflicts with Russell's lifelong efforts toward progress. For
readers, however, this listing of the multiplicity and variety of recurring injustice in human affairs shocks us into assent. Injustice can
occur: it can happen to us.
The outline of "A Judge's Nightmare" furnishes new evidence of
Russell's literary interest in this small, but powerful, narrative form.
Even the sketch reveals his strong irony; his cleverness and wit; his
skilful consciousness of his audience; and his wealth of information.
Perhaps these speculations on the story, lengthier than the outline
itself, suggest an important characteristic of the genre of the "Nightmare", displayed even in fragmentary form: each small story's astonishing density.
.
One difficulty with the "nightmares" may be that remarkable quality. In its few pages, a "nightmare" may compress technical material,
moral concerns, parody and other literary allusion, caricature, and the
juxtaposition of the serious with the flippant. "The Psychoanalyst's
Nightmare", for example, opens with a double meaning. Its subtitle is
"adjustment-a fugue". The OxfOrd English Dictionary offers this
definition of a fugue: "A polyphonic composition constructed on one
or more short subjects' or themes, which are harmonized according to
the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with
various contrapuntal devices." To this definition for the field of music,
we may add a definition for psychiatry from websters New Twentieth
Century Dictionary: "a state of psychological amnesia during which a
patient seems to behave in a normal and rational way, although he
cannot remember the period of time nor what he did during it; temporary flight from reality." Russell, of course, blends the meanings.
The principle ofcounterpoint is the chief structural method of the
story. Six voices are basic: Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Antony, Romeo,
and Hamlet. They belong, in fact, to the "Committee of Six" of the
"Limbo Rotary Club", which is holding its annual meeting. The contrapuntal device is literally a device: "a gramophone in the interior" of
the statue of Shakespeare that presides over the meeting. As in a musical fugue, a central theme appears among the voices, as each in turn
takes up the subject, his experience of a state of psychological fugue,
or a "flight from reality", from which condition he has been "cured"
by the psychoanalyst, Dr. Bombasticus. Each describes past behaviour
as the result of "f;J,ncies"; "fantasies", "imagination", "excessive feel-
Spirited Satire
77
ings", "fantasy-passions", or "hallucinations". Each statement leads to
a counter-statement from the statue of Shakespeare, so that the voice
of Shakespeare is always a reply to the thematic statement of the characters. And, just as one "exposition" of a fugue must be complete, so
the episode of Hamlet carries the statemept and contrapuntal answer
further than the other episodes carry them. The consequence is the
climax of the story, the culmination of the fugal exposition, and, simultaneously, the moment of profound psychological knowledge, an
epiphany.
The story's setting is crucial. By placing the characters in Limbo,
Russell suggests the contemporary theme of the suspended man and
alludes to the conversation of reason held in Limbo among the great
poets of antiquity in Dante's Inferno. As the only living person among
spirits, Dante is a special case. Similarly, Russell sets one voice apart,
that of Hamlet. He is the "outside" voice, the one that escapes conformity (slyly suggested by the RotaryClub). Though Hamlet cries, "I
never have dreams" (CS, p. 227), a "spark" remains in him, to be
fanned into flame by the words of the Shakespearean voice.
Thus a second principal theme of this story becomes the power of
language. Here, Russell adds to his targets. Besides psychoanalysts and
groups of "do-gooders", he teases the "ordinary-language philosophers". This group of thinkers (ironically, descendants of Russell's
own pioneering recognition in the early 1900S of the influence of
language on philosophy) made up a school of analytic philosophy of
the "linguistic persuasion" rather than, like Russell, of the "logical
persuasion". A chief difference creating the conflict between the two
groups was the value of an artificial, constructed language. Russell,
after his success in developing symbolic logic in collaboration with
Whitehead, wanted to advance such a language for philosophy also;
his opponents held that, through its analysis, ordinary language is
adequate to provide the map for reality. In his popular essay· "The
Cult of 'Common Usage''', Russell declares himself "totally unable to
accept this view" and characterizes the school as discussing "what silly
people mean when they say silly things ... " (PfM, p. 160). In the way
that Dr. Bombasticus changes Macbeth's speech from the "stilted
language that in those days he employed" to "ordinary English" (CS,
p. 222), Russell pokes fun at the idea that natural language contains
some innate knowledge justifying deference toward it as a complete
78
. Spirited Satire 79
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
medium for meaning.
The combination of the change in language with a Freudian cure is
surely deliberate, pointing up another likely target for the story, Russell's one-time pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein. As we know, Wittgenstein
developed two positions toward language. With the first, that language
mirrors reality, Russell was in accord, finding Wittgenstein's thesis
that metaphysics does not permit meaningful problems related to his
own dualistic positing in Mysticism and Logic of two realms of reality.
In a widely quoted statement, Wittgenstein says of the mystical: "That
of which we cannot speak must be assigned to silence" (Tractatus, 7).
In the story, Russell follows Hainlet's self-recognition scene with a'
counter-statement in which the statue speaks Hamlet's last words from
Shakespeare's drama:·
"0 what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" exclaimed Hamlet. "To Hell
with Dr. Bombasticus! To Hell with adjustment! To Hell with prudence and
the praise of fools!" With this Hamlet fell in a faint.
The statue: "The rest is silence,"
(CS, pp. 227-8)
Here, Russell· alludes to both the tragedy Hamlet and the effort of
Wittgenstein to consign metaphysics to silence.
As satire, however, the story appears to be aimed more directly at
Wittgenstein's later ideas. In his second position, while reiterating that
metaphysical problems are not real, Wittgenstein shifts the philosopher's task to discussing why we are tempted to ask meaningless questions at all, seeing this need as "linguistic anxiety". Russell, calling
Wittgenstein's later work an abnegation of talent, says it makes philosophy "at best, a slight help to lexicographers, and at worst, an idle teatable amusement" (MPD, p. 230). When we consider his six characters
in "The Psychoanalyst's Nightmare", we realize that, despite Russell's
satirizing of Freudian standards of "normalcy", the characters as
Shakespeare treated them were all possessed to some degree of a "madness" that led to death. In Russell's vignette, however, at least they can
talk about their madness, discussing (as psychoanalysis does) what is
reasonable in feeling and behaviour and what is not. And Hamlet, in
Russell's story-after hearing the words of the statue-achieves a
victory, the restoration of his perspective on life.
The concept of the "nightmares" rests on the possibility that dia-
logue can take place between the rational and irrational parts of
human nature, permitting a new kind of self-knowledge. In that sense,
the works of fiction are rhetorical strategies by which Russell as a
rationalist was enabled to work with doubts, fears, intuitions,and
human emotions. Emerging as a satirist of,the smiling Horatian rather
than the angry Juvenalian school of satire and trying out the familiar
satiric genres (parody, fantasy, aphorisms, science fiction), Russell
contributed this clever new form: ironic to express his plural perspective and envisioned· as a nightmare to reflect the era's need to bring
the unconscious into dialogue with reason.
Throughout his writings, Russell struggled against the belief that
philosophers have to live with silence, to abandon what he called their
"grave and important task" (MPD, p. 230). With more than sixty
books and a lifetime of campaigns, lectures, and impassioned speeches,
Russell manifested the belief that philosophers should voice ideas in
varied areas of human inquiry. He came to believe that humankind
can learn to live with perplexities, doubt, even nihilism. For him, the
essential act was trying to express them all-while leaving room to
articulate values. It is significant that narration, while ostensibly a
minor mode of discourse for Russell, gathered strength as a method
for him. Under the impetus of the World Wars and driven by fear of
the Bomb, Russell turned more and more of his primary work into
non-fictional social criticism and warning. Quite rightly, this lucid and
powerful prose brought his chief recognition. But under these influences, in a late and dramatically new chapter in a lifetime of creativity,
he also produced varied imaginative literature. Fiction allowed him to
enter realms where he otherwise would have been silent.
At the very time Russell was writing "Satan in the Suburbs", W. H.
Auden declared of satire:
In an age like our own it cannot flourish except in private circles as an
expression of private feuds; in public life, the serious evils are so importunate
that satire seems trivial and the only suitable kind of attack prophetic denunciation. '2
12
The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 385.
80
Spirited Satire 81
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
But Russell demonstrated his affirmative view of the uses of satire by
the act of writing satiric stories and sketches both because he found
amusement and joy in creating them and because, as he said, he "often
found fables the best way of making a point" (CS, p. 12). That point
was usually a satiric one.
The stories that assisted Russell in "making a point" merit an
increased audience. And by their existence the stories make a point: in
them a philosopher famed as an analytical thinker chooses a different
approach and reinforces human values as a creator of art and laughter.
APPENDIX
Among Russell's· manuscripts in the Bertrand Russell Archives (RAJ
2IO.006842-F4) is the outline for an incipient work. He titled the
planned story "A Judge's Nightmare: Socrates through the Ages" but
left it unwritten. Russell dictated the outline, and the handwriting is
that of Edith Russell (Russell's fourth wife). Here abbreviations are
expanded and minor house-styling imposed.
A Judge's Nightmare
Socrates through the Ages
I)
20
Jan. '53
Pythagoras right-riot Orpheus
Begin with last speech from the Phaedo
2)
Next Christian martyr
Judges say: "if only you were like Socrates"
He repeats Phaedo speech mutatis mutandis
3)
Next Pagan martyr-Giordano Bruno
Judges say: "if only you were like the Christian martyrs"
Phaedo speech again [not exactly the same and not saying it the
same]
4)
Next Christian executed in the French Revolution, the Terror
Phaedo speech
Ms.
of'~Judge's
Nightmare"
82
GLADYS GARNER LEITHAUSER
Judges say: if you were dying for a principle like Giordano
Bruno.
5)
Next Sacco in Boston
Phaedo speech
Judges say: "Martyr indeed! Do you dare compare yourself to
those noble men who died for the faith in 1793"
6)
NexJTrotsky in Mexico
Phaedo speech
Judges say:
The next incarnation of Socrates, dear Reader, was born in your home
town.